Admissions of Fallibility
Cognition is futile but I don’t believe in nihilism.
Understanding is a restriction of experience and it is by a reflexive framework of understanding that the stenosis of thought we foolishly call reality precludes us from the freedom of plenipotentiary chaos.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – without a locus in the autodidactic fallacies of selfhood we would cease to be ourselves and revert to observers observing the machinations of the unknowable, manifold expressions of energy and matter.
Summary: The human mind is ill-equipped to comprehend the electron positions in a grain of salt and the nature of the universe is likely more complex than a grain of salt – the most you can ask of yourself is to be forgiving of your fallibility, aware of the paradox in any declarative statement, and willing to embrace the ephemeral for all its transient glory – it’s all you’ve got.
props on this blog. i think you should have linked sagan on the subject (too) though. of course, you wouldn’t want to overdo it on the links so i’ll offer it up here:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/sagan_science.html
Why thank you – years have passed from the time I first read that essay, however, the grain of salt analogy stuck with me and (in the way it will tend to) my Google searching failed to unearth the source on such a common phrase, no matter how many unique (though half-remembered) phrases I attempted to pair with it.
“[O]ne microgram of table salt” is a far better unique identifier, though “Carl Sagan” beats even that as a primary key on the essays lookup table.